SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1315 Her Best Friend Died From Terminal Cancer, She Launches MedTech SaaS Raising $2.5m on $10m Pre
01 Mar 2019
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Be kind to yourself and remember your mind's a powerful thing. Imagine positive things, not negative ones. She jumped in and took a very negative experience in the form of her friend becoming very, very sick three years ago. Launched us, Paul.
Chapter 2: What inspired Kim to start Trials.ai?
Launched her own company in 2016, Trials.ai, to speed up the clinical approval process, which can take a long, long, long time. She's now got a team of eight. They've raised $750,000, about four customers, doing $25,000 per month in revenue, $300,000 per year.
Too early to talk about unit economics, but they're currently raising another $2.5 million on hopefully a $10 million pre-money valuation to continue scaling the company. This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn.
Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million. I had no money when I started the company. It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs. We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers.
With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everyone. My guest this morning is Kim Walpole. She started her third company, Trials AI, after her best friend was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given five months to live.
What began as a passion project has turned into a mission-driven venture-backed startup that is turning the clinical trials ecosystem on its head. Take us to the top.
I am.
All right. So first off, anytime someone hears like clinical trials or anything med tech or later right now, they just think Theranos, right? So walk me through like what you guys do and is there a technical component or is it a system that you put together? How does it work?
Yeah. So, good question. We are using artificial intelligence to fix what we believe are the two root causes of failure in clinical trials. So, in simple speak, we're making it really easy for researchers to run clinical trials faster, cheaper, and easier.
Okay. And give me a little bit more detail on how you're doing that.
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Chapter 3: How does Trials.ai improve the clinical trial process?
And so it would be, gosh, probably a couple of months that we actually started working on it because we had already been, you know, while we were going through this with Paul, kind of figuring out some things.
So it was 2013 and about five years ago.
No, it was three years ago that Paul died. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's okay. So we started the company, you know, in 2016.
Officially?
Officially.
Okay. And I think you've decided to raise capital to push this thing forward. How much have you raised today and why did you decide to raise?
Sure. So we bootstrapped as far as we could go. We were really fortunate because our first customers, while we had an MVP, were willing to pay something so that we could continue to build the technology. And from there, we have kind of
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of AI in clinical trials according to Kim?
pulled together this process. And, you know, we started with actual paying customers to start. And then we got to the point where we decided, okay, we're going to need to raise capital so that we can continue to scale the company, add additional people on, you know, And we raised $750,000 back in the end of December, and now we're doing a $2.5 million raise.
As we speak.
Correct.
And give me a general sense of what the market's like today. Do you feel like it's easy to raise? It's going well? It's more difficult?
That's a good question. I think, you know, this is an interesting space to be in right now. Clinical trials is a really hot conversation. And so a couple of years ago when we initially started thinking about raising, there was definitely this sense of, you know, AI in clinical trials, like clinical trials isn't hot as it is. You're trying to apply AI, you know, we're not sure about that.
And so it was really interesting for us going through that process and going, okay, maybe we'll wait until, you know, the, the, there's a better climate. And I think right now really is, we've got a lot of interest from investors right now. We're really just looking to lock in our lead. But in terms of just all around interest, we've got emails coming in, calls, let's talk. So pretty exciting.
That's great, Kim. That's really great. Congratulations. And to walk me through a little bit more of the numbers there. So I mean, what, what valuation would you love to raise at?
The conversations we're having is at a 10 million pre.
Okay. That's good. And do you mind sharing kind of what revenue is today so we can get a sense of what multiple you're negotiating for?
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Chapter 5: What is the current revenue model for Trials.ai?
Too early to talk about unit economics, but they're currently raising another 2.5 million bucks on hopefully a $10 million pre-money valuation to continue scaling the company. Kim, thank you so much for taking us to the top.
Thank you so much. Take care.